Intel's presentation at CES on Monday night contrasted the skilfully produced showcase of the company's new initiatives – which culminated in the introduction of a 49-qubit chip for quantum computing – with the harsh realities brought about by the Meltdown and Specter vulnerabilities.

Although Meltdown and Specter are industry issues that affect chip companies such as ARM and Intel, as well as operating system vendors, browser vendors and cloud computing companies, Intel has been the face of the problem. Chief Executive Brian Krzanich reiterated that, to his knowledge, the company had not seen any data loss as a result of the vulnerabilities.

Krzanich assured the audience that Intel was committed to addressing the vulnerabilities of Meltdown and Specter. "Security is the number one job for Intel and our industry," he said.

It seems that Intel is taking it seriously. The Oregonian reported that Intel formed a new group, called Intel Product Assurance and Security, designed to block the company's processors. The group will be headed by Leslie Culbertson, former director of its financial organization. It will also include Steve Smith, vice president of Intel and general manager of his engineering group. It was Smith who explained the vulnerabilities of Meltdown and Specter to investors last week. Coincidentally, Smith was also the Pentium manager who explained Intel's FDIV error to reporters 24 years ago.

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Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich speaks at the CES 2018 show in Las Vegas. [19659008] The data is driving Intel

Krzanich spent the rest of his speech reiterating some of the investments that Intel has made in technologies designed to improve live sporting events and movies. It is not surprising that Intel's goal is to take advantage of and take advantage of the applications that require the largest amount of data, and thus generate the greatest demand for their chips. Sports and movie applications involve several high-definition cameras that do not trigger an event as it happens and translate it into "voxels," or a three-dimensional representation that can be viewed from various angles. An NFL football game recorded in this way will generate three terabytes of data per minute, said Krzanich.

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Data will continue to drive Intel's product development, said Krzanich.

Intel will expand soon. They tell us that he is broadcasting thirty events of the Winter Olympics in South Korea in a month, both live and on virtual reality. A separate initiative, known as Intel Studios, used 100 cameras mounted in a giant circle to shoot a scene from all angles simultaneously, creating a representation of the voxel-based shot.

Intel still has plans for PC chips. On Sunday, Intel released detailed descriptions of the Kaby Lake-G chips, Core chips that include a semi-custom Radeon Vega part of its supposed rival AMD. Krzanich showed another new chip during his presentation, and it's surprising: a 49-qubit chip for quantum computing.

Intel, like other manufacturers, has been busy exploring the possibilities of quantum computing, which rules out traditional binaries and zeros for superpositional states that can represent several additional values. By using these quantum chips, Intel and others believe that they can solve problems of a much higher complexity than traditional silicon microprocessors, although Intel and its rivals have invested billions in the continuous improvement of those chips. Loihi, an Intel chip designed to simulate a brain, is one of those chips that Krzanich mentioned as an example.

IBM, one of Intel's main rivals, has developed a 50-qub chip that it allegedly brought to CES. [19659002] "This 49-qubit chip goes beyond our ability to simulate and push toward quantum supremacy, the point at which quantum computers surpass the best supercomputers in the world," Krzanich said.

"We hope to solve the key technical challenges that must be overcome to advance quantum computing," added Krzanich.

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